Natural language processing (NLP) involves developing systems that allow computers to understand and communicate using human language. NLP aims to understand syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. It addresses challenges like ambiguity, where a sentence can have multiple possible meanings. Syntactic parsing is the process of analyzing a sentence's structure using a context-free grammar to produce a parse tree. Top-down and bottom-up parsing are two approaches to syntactic parsing where top-down starts with the start symbol and bottom-up starts with the sentence's terminal symbols.